Dave Taylor answers free tech support questions about a wide variety of business and technical topics, including blogging, iphone help, ipod help, AdSense, MySpace, Sony PSP help, Mp3 players, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux, SEO, Mac OS X, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

How do I figure out an individual Twitter status URL?

I have been using Twhirl as my Twitter client and am pretty happy with it, but I'm baffled by one thing: recently someone sent me an email that included a URL on Twitter that took me to a page that had just a single tweet on it. How did they do that?

Dave's Answer:

A little known feature of Twitter is that each and every "tweet", or message sent on the system, has a unique identifying number and that if you know that number, you can actually construct a URL that shows just that one message on the page.

The URLs look like this:

http://twitter.com/FilmBuzz/statuses/862509661

The Twitter account in question is FilmBuzz and the unique status update ID is 862509661.

But how did I figure that number out? Turns out that it's the time stamp on a Twitter message that links to the unique URL for that tweet, so in Twhirl, I clicked on the following:

As you can see, I'm going to click on the timestamp that says "about 7h ago", at which point Twhirl hands the URL to my Web browser, Flock, and I see:

The URL of that page tells me what I want to know, and I can now easily copy and paste that URL onto a Web page (like this!) or into an email message to some Beatles fans I know (or, perhaps, someone who is an Emerson, Lake and Palmer fan, one or the other).

Hope that helps. It certainly isn't an intuitive path to get the answer!

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Categorized: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Social Network Help (Article 8399)
Tagged: micro-blogging, twhirl, twitter
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Comments

Thanks Dave. I was wondering how to do that. How do you come up with these great questions all the time?

Posted by: Rob McNealy at July 19, 2008 9:03 PM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!